The present invention relates to an information retrieving apparatus such as commodity information which has been built into databases in various formats for description and, more particularly, to an information retrieving apparatus on various commodities provided by different providers on a communication basis, e.g., over the Internet.
Recently, selling by correspondence utilizing virtual shopping malls or shopping pages provided over computer communication or the Internet has been holding the spotlight.
However, consumers who purchase commodities through such shopping malls or shopping pages have problems such as inability to find commodities that they are looking for. Providers who provide commodities have a problem that their customers do not visit their shops (or the customers do not access their home pages). The term "commodities" implies here not only material commodities but also immaterial commodities. For example, in the case of a commodity provider who is a broadcaster, the commodity is services such as programs that it broadcasts.
Among the above-described problems, the inability to find commodities as a problem at the consumers' side refers to situations as described below.
It refers to a situation wherein one can not find a program that broadcasts a piece of music he or she wishes to listen to from among programs for broadcast or a situation wherein one can not find a movie film that he or she wishes to watch to see a certain actor performing because a program table shows only general information. It further refers to such a situation that one can not find a home page that sells a certain commodity that he or she looks for over the Internet.
From the providers' point of view, referring to current retrieval services in the Internet as an example, there is a problem in that a new WWW (World Wide Web) site opened on the Internet can not be found by consumers because the services employ a system in which commodities are accessed from the consumers' side.
Conventional retrieval services in the Internet will now be specifically examined.
When a user searches information on the WWW, in general, the user retrieves information by passing keywords for retrieval services to, for example, a retrieval engine or the like. However, since such retrieval services handle an enormous number of WWW pages, too many results of retrieval can be provided or irrelevant pages can be returned unless the keywords are specified properly. This is significant especially in the case of retrieval of commodities for on-line shopping.
For example, let us assume here that pages of on-line shopping on the WWW are searched in an attempt to purchase a red polo shirt from a certain manufacturer. Then, the user carries out retrieval by specifying "polo shirt", "manufacturer name" and "red" as keywords, but results of retrieval are returned including many irrelevant pages such as a page that introduces jeans from the relevant manufacturer and polo shirts from other manufactures and an essay on polo shirts from Ralph Lauren which is irrelevant to the intention of the user to purchase.
On the contrary, retrieval using keywords provided by retrieval services searches only WWW pages including keywords that coincide with the input, and it is not necessarily possible to find pages which seem to be relevant. Specifically, as shown in FIG. 1, retrieval in search of a commodity named "Blade Runner" can return only data which conform to all of keywords "commodity name" and "Blade Runner" as a result of retrieval (only the data indicated by the solid line in FIG. 1). Therefore, the WWW pages including information "Title: Blade Runner" or "Title in Japanese: Blade Runner" indicated by the dotted lines in FIG. 1 can not be obtained as a result of retrieval. Thus, it is not necessarily possible to retrieve desired information using keywords.
As described above, since current retrieval of commodities is carried out on a full test basis, there are problems in that a result of retrieval can include many irrelevant things and in that a desired commodity can not be found.
The above-described problems result from a fact that keywords to be retrieved are associated with pages instead of commodities and a fact that keywords are extracted from words that appear on pages and therefore the intentions of information providers that are not written on the pages (e.g., whether the pages are intended for selling or introduction) are not the object of retrieval. In order to solve such problems and to allow a user to utilize retrieval services intuitively, it is desirable to perform retrieval based on the features of commodities registered by information providers instead of keywords that are automatically extracted.